A motion effect may be applied to still images to make the images look more vivid and attractive. For example, one type of motion effect, referred to as a “Ken Burns” effect, is one in which a still image is displayed with a slow zooming and/or panning effect as well as fading transitions between frames. For example, the Ken Burns effect may zoom in on a character of interest in the image or zoom out from the character of interest. Also, a panning effect may pan from one side of the image to another side of the image to change focus from one object to another object. The zooming and panning effects may catch a user's eye when viewing the image as opposed to just displaying a still image.
To create a Ken Burns effect, a user may review a still image and manually create one or more boxes in the image. For a zooming motion effect, the user may create a first box around an object in the image and another larger box around the first box. The Ken Burns effect could then zoom in from displaying content in the larger box to displaying content in the smaller box or zoom out for the smaller box to the larger box. Also, the user may choose to create a panning effect by creating separate multiple boxes in the image. The Ken Burns effect then creates the panning effect by displaying content from one box to displaying content in the other box. The above manual process is inefficient and requires the user to review and analyze each image. When a video delivery service has a large amount of images for which to create the motion effects, the above process may be time-consuming. Also, the above process may rely on a user's subjective judgment to create the effects. That is, the user decides which object to zoom in on or zoom out from, or which objects to pan from and to. The user's subjective judgement may not always create the most desired effect. One way to not manually define the Ken Burns effect is to randomly select the zooming and/or panning operations. The random generation of the Ken Burns effect, however, may not always result in the most desired or attractive use of the effect.